A warming planet is helping humans

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.”
– Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the
world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a
major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system
into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods,
droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have
ever experienced – a catastrophe of our own making.”
– Al Gore,
An Inconvenient Truth 2006

via Herald Sun | Andrew Bolt

Matt Ridley says global warming policies are deadlier than global warming:

Why climate change is good for the world

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century… 

Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University … reviewed 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends… [and] calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2 C of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper)… The latest estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that such temperatures may not be reached till the end of the century — if at all…

Now Prof Tol has a new paper … [which] concludes that climate change did indeed raise human and planetary welfare during the 20th century… By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025…

The chief benefits of global warming include: fewer winter deaths; lower energy costs; better agricultural yields; probably fewer droughts; maybe richer biodiversity. It is a little-known fact that winter deaths exceed summer deaths — not just in countries like Britain but also those with very warm summers, including Greece….

The greatest benefit from climate change comes not from temperature change but from carbon dioxide itself. It is not pollution, but the raw material from which plants make carbohydrates and thence proteins and fats. As it is an extremely rare trace gas in the air — less than 0.04 per cent of the air on average — plants struggle to absorb enough of it. On a windless, sunny day, a field of corn can suck half the carbon dioxide out of the air…

The increase in average carbon dioxide levels over the past century, from 0.03 per cent to 0.04 per cent of the air, has had a measurable impact on plant growth rates… As Dr Ranga Myneni of Boston University has documented, using three decades of satellite data, 31 per cent of the global vegetated area of the planet has become greener and just 3 per cent has become less green…

Well yes, you may argue, but what about all the weather disasters caused by climate change? Entirely mythical — so far. The latest IPCC report is admirably frank about this, reporting ‘no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency offloads on a global scale … low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms’.

In fact, the death rate from droughts, floods and storms has dropped by 98 per cent since the 1920s, according to a careful study by the independent scholar Indur Goklany. Not because weather has become less dangerous but because people have gained better protection as they got richer…

[But] climate policy is already doing harm. Building wind turbines, growing biofuels and substituting wood for coal in power stations — all policies designed explicitly to fight climate change — have had negligible effects on carbon dioxide emissions. But they have driven people into fuel poverty, made industries uncompetitive, driven up food prices, accelerated the destruction of forests, killed rare birds of prey, and divided communities. To name just some of the effects. Mr Goklany estimates that globally nearly 200,000 people are dying every year, because we are turning 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel instead of food: that pushes people into malnutrition and death. In this country, 65 people a day are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly, according to Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster, yet the government is planning to double the cost of electricity to consumers by 2030.

Continue Reading »

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A must watch – Greening the Planet – Dr. Matt Ridley | Watts Up With That?

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Related Studies, Information :

• Deserts ‘greening’ from rising CO2 | CSIRO
  
• Extra carbon dioxide boosting growth in desert plants: CSIRO | The Australian (Paywalled)
• NASA SATELLITE – The global dance of carbon dioxide and spreading green flora « JoNova
• Record corn crop forecasts and world record 2013 grain harvests – Herald Sun
• How Fossil Fuels Prevent Death From Extreme Weather Study
• Lack of access to fossil fuels causing millions of premature deaths amongst the poorest of the planet (Peer Review Study)

Matt Ridley Essential Reading :

• Why nobody ever calls the weather normal (Taxing Air book review) | The Australian
  
• Matt Ridley: Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change – WSJ.com
• Welcome To Matt Ridley Online
• MUST READ BOOK – The Rational Optimist – Matt Ridley

Climatism Related :

• Bananas deadlier than Fukushima | CACA
• Bureaucratic Dioxide | CACA
• NATURE STUDY Confirms Global Warming Stopped 15 Years Ago | CACA
• 44th Pacific “Sinking Islands” Extortion Forum | CACA
• 97% of climate models say that 97% of climate scientists are wrong | CACA
• Europe’s Green Energy Basket Case Is Barack Obama’s Dream | CACA
• One Of The More Illuminating Articles You May Ever Read On Global Warming | CACA
• Climate money: Monopoly science « JoNova (Judith Curry IPCC Update) | CACA
• Global Warming Theory ~ Circular reasoning at its best | CACA

Must Reads On How Environmentalism Is Hurting The Environment & Making The Poor, Poorer :